Trade Policy

Trade between individuals existed even before there were organized states; before there was any meaning attached to the concept of a border between states. Once societies became in any way organized, trade occurred in ways quite recognizable as trade in more recent times. Early empires — Sumerian, Egyptian, Greek and Roman — were trading empires, precursors of the European maritime empires that date from the late fifteenth century. As Strange argues, ‘trade and war are the two oldest forms of international relations’ (1988, p. 161). And, in the present day, international trade is central to the interaction of businesses with each other and with their national governments. Trade has increased faster than the world economy, almost quadrupling between 1970 and 1997 while over this same period global production only doubled (Audretsch and Bonser, 2002, p. 5). However, the increases in trade and the integration of the international trading system have not been without controversy.